The Arab Spring and the Unfinished Revolutions

By virtue of its encod­ing pow­er and in addi­tion to its com­mu­nica­tive func­tion, lan­guage is a tool of con­trol par excel­lence. The Ger­man philoso­pher Hegel sug­gests that the world can be obvi­ous­ly may­hem with­out the abil­i­ty to attribute labels to dif­fer­ent items and the pos­si­bil­i­ty to encap­su­late abstract con­cepts with­in the con­fines of lex­is.

Yet, the attempt to con­trol a diverse pletho­ra of things and ideas soon turns into an oppres­sive maneu­ver that restrains sig­nif­i­cant­ly the breath of human per­cep­tion and thought as sug­gest­ed by Sapir and Whorf in their the­o­ry of lin­guis­tic deter­min­ism. Dur­ing the course of its usage, any lex­i­cal item can become dif­fer­ent from the notion it was ini­tial­ly intend­ed to ren­der.

Indeed, the neces­si­ty to use lin­guis­tic nomen­cla­ture is like­ly to frost abstract ideas in an immutable frame of ref­er­ence. For instance, the term rev­o­lu­tion is often referred to as a date in the records of his­to­ry. Thus, any rad­i­cal change in the modes of gov­er­nance is often accred­it­ed the sta­tus of a land­mark event.

Despite being essen­tial­ly marked by an imme­di­ate replace­ment of a gov­ern­ing body by anoth­er, rev­o­lu­tion remains less prompt than expect­ed. As a mat­ter of fact, rev­o­lu­tions take decades to ger­mi­nate and an unpre­dictable num­ber of years to end.

Six­ty years ago, the Egypt­ian Free offi­cers mas­ter­mind­ed a suc­cess­ful mil­i­tary coup against king Farouk. Yet, the new Egypt­ian repub­lic would return incre­men­tal­ly to a total­i­tar­i­an rule bol­stered under Mubarak regime.

The rev­o­lu­tion that took place on Jan­u­ary 25, 2011 was undis­put­ed­ly a spec­tac­u­lar act of civ­il dis­obe­di­ence against Mubarak‘s oppres­sive regime. Yet the rev­o­lu­tion was not that deci­sive and the stride towards free­dom, democ­ra­cy and plu­ral­ism is still polar­iz­ing Egyp­tians.

The Arab spring upheaval removed only one lay­er of com­plex­i­ty, but the chal­lenges lying ahead for Egypt are numer­ous. The rev­o­lu­tion that was ini­tial­ly sup­posed to estab­lish free­dom and equal dis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth turned to be a mul­ti­fac­eted process.

Beyond the ide­o­log­i­cal divide between sec­u­lar­ists and Islamists, lies a broad spec­trum of bina­ries oppos­ing the mil­i­tary and their acolytes to the civ­il gov­ern­ment, not to men­tion the pre­car­i­ous eco­nom­ic sit­u­a­tion caught between slug­gish growth and high exter­nal debt.

It is note­wor­thy that the con­cerns of the com­mon peo­ple per­tained ini­tial­ly to social rights name­ly edu­ca­tion, employ­ment and health care. Nev­er­the­less, there are mount­ing fears today about a poten­tial reli­gious takeover fol­low­ing the Iran­ian mod­el.

The extent to which Sharia law can gov­ern pub­lic life will sure­ly be at the epi­cen­ter of the debate in many Arab coun­tries. Any bid to estab­lish a state total­ly absolved from the pow­er of reli­gion would be a mis­step.

On the oth­er hand, envis­ag­ing a soci­ety gov­erned unyield­ing­ly by the prin­ci­ples of Sharia with­out the effort of con­tex­tu­al­iza­tion and inter­pre­ta­tion would result in a reli­gious ortho­doxy. His­to­ry has taught us that the mass­es abhor all forms of coer­cion, be they on behalf of reli­gion or under the ban­ner of sec­u­lar­ism.

In his book, Islam the Rad­i­cal Reform, Tarik Ramadan pin­points that the “urgent issue here is not to con­ceive the exis­tence of a link between reli­gion and pol­i­tics, for it has always exist­ed, but rather to iden­ti­fy the kind of rela­tion­ship that we can con­sid­er and pro­mote.”

In the Arab con­text, the polit­i­cal rev­o­lu­tions require also a rev­o­lu­tion of ide­olo­gies espe­cial­ly in the way we per­ceive plu­ral­i­ty in mod­ern Arab coun­tries, a plu­ral­i­ty not only in terms of faith, but also in terms of ide­o­log­i­cal lean­ings. This intro­spec­tion bid can­not pos­si­bly be reveal­ing with­out a sus­tain­able con­tri­bu­tion of intel­lec­tu­als.

To sum up, the term rev­o­lu­tion does not denote only a punc­tu­al event that marks dis­tinc­tive­ly the rup­ture with a mode of gov­er­nance and the estab­lish­ment of anoth­er. Rev­o­lu­tions emerge in con­tin­u­um and thrive in con­tin­u­um. Until deci­sion-mak­ers and their elec­torate can iden­ti­fy the new “change” as a per­ma­nent real­i­ty, the rev­o­lu­tion must go on.

—Writ­ten By Loub­na Flah
(Loub­na Flah is cor­re­spon­dent of Moroc­co World News.

(Pub­lished in The Laal­tain — Issue 6)